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And that was very successful for explaining and for our understanding of the solar system. But then in around 1846 or so, a French astronomer whose name was Verier and an English astronomer whose name was Adams, began to conjecture the existence of an unseen planet. Observations had been made of the last seen planet in our solar system at the time, which was Uranus; and they noticed that Uranus was doing a weird wobbling. And they couldn’t figure out what was causing that. Was there something wrong with the field of gravity? Was there something in the gravitational field at that distance which we didn’t take into account? So they conjectured the existence of an unseen planet which they called Neptune. And later on, when Neptune was discovered, it explained the funny motion of Uranus.

And there was once another attempt, when Mercury was acting so weird … its wobbles and anomalies and certain things… and people thought, “Well, maybe there’s another planet inside the orbit of Mercury which we don’t see which is called Vulcan. And nobody found Vulcan. And people wondered why Mercury was behaving that way. And that, in fact, needed an extension of Newtonian physics. That’s where Einsteinian general relativity came into the picture. So it’s always possible that an extension of the theory can explain the so-called missing mass. Or it very may well be that there is missing mass. And the tendency right now is to explore what is the least radical. And the least radical right now, even though it sounds strange to us, is dark matter.

In other words, some kind of matter in the universe which is causing the rapid expansion of the universe; and that’s also been posited by a term in Einstein’s equations which he himself just threw in, like adding an extra onion to the cook pot; which was called the Cosmological Constant. And when he added that in - his attempt was to try to stabilize the universe from expanding, because at that time he believed the universe was static and shouldn’t be expanding. But later when Hubble and observations from the Hubble on the expansion of the universe took place, people saw that the cosmological constant wasn’t needed, because the equations Einstein had originally written down predicted expansion. He said it was the biggest, most embarrassing thing he’d ever done.

And so now, with the repulsion or the enhanced expansion, it’s been deemed that maybe there is some kind of cosmological constant, but it’s acting repulsively rather than acting in a way to keep things from expanding; it’s pushing things out faster. So that’s where the dark matter and dark energy idea has come into the picture.

WTB - So if we’re talking about an unknown subspace realm…

WOLF – Well, not necessarily an unknown subspace realm, but more or less something which we don’t detect through normal means. It doesn’t mean that it’s in some weird realm. It just means its properties are such that we don’t see it, and that’s kind of difficult to imagine. It’s some kind of vacuum kind of energy. And people are speculating as to what the form might be. But so far that’s theoretical.

WTB – In your seminar after the conference in Vancouver you said, “The future is the unknown force pushing molecules into their evolutionary destiny.” And when I was reading about dark matter my mind has gone to, ‘Well, maybe dark matter literally is a realm of thought.’ Or, ‘We have the Many Worlds Theory, well, where are those many worlds and dimensions? Could they actually be present as dark matter and we just can’t measure them at this point?’ Or running across your quote, maybe dark matter is the future pushing its evolutionary destiny at us? My mind has gone into many different rabbit holes on this.

WOLF – The idea that dark matter might be something that’s akin to, in effect, due to alternate realities / alternate universes … that’s an interesting speculation. I really don’t know. I haven’t thought about it in that light. That is interesting. I don’t know why it would act the way it does in terms of anti-gravity and making things expand faster, which is acting repulsively. I don’t necessarily see that connection.

Generally when you posit the existence of something and make a speculative thought like that imaginative idea, usually you do so – I mean when physicists do so, they kinda do it as if they were imaging how to move while they’re tied up in straight jackets. And the straight jackets that they wear are self-imposed. That is, I’m not going to imagine something just for the sake of imagining it, but it’s gotta fit within the prescribed formulations that currently work. So the straightjacket is that prescribed formulation that works. So if you’re going to assume that dark matter means parallel universes, well then that’s fine. But why then, would those parallel universes act repulsively? That would be one question. Why would they appear that way? Since there doesn’t seem to be anything but adding another assumption to make that make sense, then you’re on the old thing of what’s holding that up?

You know the old theory of the universe is that it’s floating on the back of a turtle. Well, then the question is, ‘What’s holding the turtle up?’ And the answer would be, ‘It’s turtles all the way down.’ So we get into the same problem here once you start imagining things – and a lot of people do without understanding that it isn’t enough just to explain something by imagination. Because if in doing so you keep inventing more hypotheses, you eventually run to the point of unbelievability, because there’s no way of justifying that. So the whole idea of physics is to simplify assumptions that you can make that help you explain things. And if those simplifying assumptions serve to be wrong, then you need to find something even simpler. So right now the current betting is on that somebody is going to find some structure to dark matter, and they’re looking for ways of doing that. And they involve things like String Theory, and that’s where the current physics thinking is really at.

As far as I can tell, String Theory has nothing to do with parallel universes. Although there is some interest in the notion of parallel realities called Branes. And the idea is that somehow these universes seem to be needed in order to explain certain properties of what are called Super Symmetric Strings. And that’s waaaay difficult to explain … even to myself. I’m still learning it myself as to what all that means. But it has to do with Strings that tend to get tied and Strings which get untied. And untied Strings are called gravitons – or these are the ones which seem to escape from one universe to another. And the tied Strings seem to be bound into the Branes (by universe I mean a brame-like membrane). So the idea people have is that somehow the gravitational field, which has been elusive and very difficult to explain in terms of particle physics that we have, may be due to this movement from one brame to another. I mean, these are all very speculative, highly theoretical and very mathematically developed, but very difficult to explain.

WTB – Why is gravity so elusive as far as particle physics is concerned?

WOLF - Well, the main reason is probably due to the fact that we’ve approached it the way we have. If we’d approached it differently it may not be as elusive. But the approach that we took was we looked at the scale upon which forces that we discover in the universe direct – in other words, the strength of these forces. The strongest force that we find is called the strong force. The reason it’s so strong is because it holds the particles which make up the nucleus of any atom, it holds those particles together. And why do you need a force to hold them together? And the answer is the electromagnetic force, which is the next force on the scale of things. [And the electromagnetic force is needed] because they’re so many positively charged particles embedded in the nucleus of an atom, they would tend to repel each other and because of the area that these objects are compacted into, this would tend to make them very explosive in terms of repelling. It’s like trying to put two north poles of a magnet together. If you bring them together it takes considerable force to do so. So the question is, what is the force that is keeping the [electromagnetic] repulsion of the little positively charged particles, what’s holding them in? And that’s called the strong force.

Then came the electric force, and then from that came something called the electro-weak force. And that was something which explained why nuclei suddenly give birth to electrons. It’s not the atom giving birth, but the nuclei itself suddenly spits out an electron or sometimes a positron, and this is called electro-weak decay. And that was understood in terms of another force which is weaker than electro-magnetic but stronger than gravity. And then the last force on the list was gravity. So it was the force of least interest in the nuclear zoo. And that was because all the development was to explain the nuclear zoo and how the physics of that subatomic world worked. Because quantum physics was a successful theory and everything scaled the right way when you put the various ideas of quantum physics together with these force laws. Gravity, ah, simply played no role. But when you go to the large-scale world, the world of everyday matter that we deal with, these other forces, because they’re so strong, they’re usually screened out. In other words there’s always something to neutralize them; like the nuclear force is neutralized by being contained within the nucleus, it doesn’t get out of that. And the electro-magnetic force is contained by the size of an atom, it doesn’t get out of that, except when you run electricity through wires. And the electroweak force you hardly ever see. So the only force that’s left, the only thing left that we experience daily, is gravity. And it’s very weak, but nevertheless very long range in comparison.

And then the question was, how do we explain that? Well, the same physics you used that worked so well in a small range, that just doesn’t scale well to include gravity. So people started trying to figure out what scale will we actually see gravity acting? And they found out that the place where you could find a scale for gravity was at an even smaller scale than the scale of the nucleus. We had to go to the sub, sub, sub nuclear scale, and that’s called the Planck Length, after Max Planck who first conceived of the idea. And on that scale of things, because distances are so small, even the gravitational force gets a chance. And that’s sort of what happens. Because the gravitational force goes proportional to one over the distance between the objects squared. So as you go smaller and smaller and smaller, you can find a scale in which it seems to be operating in a stronger way, but it’s very small, very tiny. And that’s where people began to look and that’s where current String Theory is investigating right now.

WTB – Then of course Roger Penrose is speculating that the Planck Scale is actually information based.

WOLF – Yes. That was an interesting speculation and one of the reasons your questions and your insights may fit in. Well, first let me explain that one of the problems is that quantum mechanics predicts that we should have an infinite number of alternate universes. And the prediction is born out. Whenever we do experiments to detect the alternate universes in terms of the effect they have on anything we see in so-called this universe, we see the effects are real. This is called all the different possibilities that objects can assume when experiments are done on them and that’s fine. But when we go to refine them or do any experiment where we just want to get one possibility, only that possibility shows up and the others seem to disappear. And the question is, what makes that change from appearing and disappearing? What’s going on? And the current theory is that it’s observation which makes things change from multiple worlds to a single world. Somehow the observer’s making the observed appear the way that it does. And that’s really the heart of the movie.

But it’s a lot more complicated than that. People jump on the bandwagon saying, “Oh I create my own reality.” Well you don’t create your own reality. It doesn’t quite work that way.